Love in Banishment
Cousin Layla lived in a cul-de-sac in the nice bit of Basildon, and thanks to Ricky’s accurate bone readings over the years, she had bought this new build red brick detached house with a front drive and back garden. Her personal training business was flourishing. She had a rescue greyhound called Harvey and a large ball of mindless white fluff and claws called Marshmallow.
She didn’t smell like someone Katy needed to devour for the greater good, but she also wasn’t the kind of family member who could stand up for herself against some of the others.
Katy grabbed her phone and checked her messages, but Wes hadn’t sent her anything.
She messaged Carrie instead, to see how he was.
Carrie sent her a photo of a man she’d never seen before in her life.
He reminded her so strongly of their dad that he had to be her brother. He had the same sort of frame that Kieran had had, the same slicked-back hair that Liam had experimented with before he went with a mullet for some godawful reason, the same cheekbones as their mum.
His brown eyes were the same as hers, but deeply tired, even ringed with immaculate eyeliner like some sulky rockstar. He had the same nose as the rest of them, but maybe a bit longer than hers. It gave his face almost perfect symmetry.
The only thing that spoiled the whole balance of his face were his lips. Their thinness was a bit of a let-down. There was something cynical and jaded about the smile, something slightly twisted and cocky, and that made up for it.
Katy had to remind herself sharply this was a picture of her brother, her brother she’d known her entire life, and she wasn’t looking at some hyped-up heartthrob she was expected to want to snog.
Anyway, he was too thin.
She realised with a sudden pang that for all his fancy restaurants and vegan cuisine and a motherfucking chef coming in to cook dinner at the penthouse, Wes didn’t eat properly. She struggled to remember him eating more than once or twice a day, and he definitely didn’t take supplements.
Throwing off the sheets, she pulled on Layla’s spare dressing gown and joined her cousin downstairs. Layla was still bandaged around her waist, the stump of her glory protruding a little. She had cancelled her clients, citing a hernia.
“My brother lost his glory too,” she said, leaning on the kitchen counter while Layla fed the pets.
Layla stiffened. “He what?”
“He gave it up being a hero.”
There was a pause, then Layla relaxed. “Oh, sorry, you mean Dave, right? God, is he okay? I thought for a second—”
“No, I do mean Wes.” Katy bridled a little at the idea other people had as low an opinion of Wes as she did. Coming from Layla, she thought, it hit different. “Want to see? You can remember him now and everything.”
“Oh God, no.” Layla shook her head. “We used to fuck, remember? I’d rather live in ignorance.” She frowned. “Wes being a hero? Are – no offence, but are you sure that’s how it happened? Like, was it on purpose?”
“He’s not bad looking,” Katy said, ignoring that last part and feeling weirdly defensive. “Just, you know, like my other brothers.”
“Yeah, like I said,” Layla muttered, stroking Harvey’s smooth black back as he trotted over to his bowl. She froze and turned. “Oh, babes, no offence, really. I just—”
“What’s wrong with Porters?” Katy demanded, amused and outraged. “We’re hot.”
“Wend-McVeys are hotter.” Layla tossed her hair. “It’s the outbreeding.”
“Bollocks, we got all the best bits, like, condensed.” Katy rescued her own mug and sipped her coffee. “Porters are way fitter. We’re taller, faster, we’ve got great skin…”
“Wend-McVeys got the looks and the brains,” Layla said, shrugging. “Plus, we get to be blondes and redheads. Deal with it.”
“Mm-mm.” Katy nearly burned her mouth and shook her head. “Porters are smarter.”
Layla let out a gasp of mock-outrage and crossed her arms, a teasing challenge in her eyes.
“Never trust a Porter. Everyone knows Porters are fuck-ups.”
Katy raised her eyebrows, enjoying the warmth of the coffee’s steam against her lips. “Never turn your back on a Wend-McVey, they don’t care which way they shaft you.”
“Yeeeah, you know what, generalising and stereotyping really isn’t on,” Layla said tartly, turning back to the toaster. “And anyway, that’s rich from the line that spawned Wesley bloody Porter.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to see his picture?” Katy toyed with her phone. “It’s really weird. To see him and remember him, I mean. I need to show someone how weird it is. He looked so good in the Outside. Like, so full of life. He was, I don’t know. So vibrant there, somehow. And now he’s just…” She sighed, exasperated at the lack of adequate words. “He looks like some guy who’s really gone through it, you know?”
Layla sighed. “Go on then.”
Katy showed her, and Layla stared at the image on the screen for a while, zooming in and out and scrolling up and down.
“So that’s who he is,” Layla said eventually, and gave her the phone back. “All I remember is he used to make my whole body vibrate.”
“Whoa.” Katy shook her head, squirming on the spot. “No. Didn’t need that, thanks.”
“Now, he was a real monster,” Layla said, with far too much glee at Katy’s visceral discomfort. “Sometimes, if I think about it too much, I can still feel him.”
Katy full-body cringed, nearly spilling her coffee down herself, and Layla burst out laughing.
“Oh babes.”
The doorbell rang.
Layla stopped laughing.
Katy’s tail clicked out. “Let me answer it,” she said.
“It might be my brothers,” Layla said, lowering her voice. “Or my mum. I – I told mum about Uncle Danny last night. Not all of it. Just that he, he wasn’t coming home.” All the teasing mirth drained out of her, and she looked pained, tired, washed-out.
Katy nodded. She’d never met Layla’s mum, something of a disgrace in Gran’s eyes for having babies out of wedlock (in the Nineties) with some Swedish regular chap who worked on the oil rigs in the North Sea. She’d never met Layla’s brothers, either, who hadn’t Changed. Wend-McVeys were so outbred now that sometimes it skipped.
“Let’s see.”
The doorbell chimed again.
Harvey whined, tucking his tail between his legs.
Katy frowned. “Does he usually do that if it’s your mum?”
Layla shook her head, and slid a knife out of the block on the counter. Katy eyed it.
“You – you won’t need that. But okay.”
They moved to the hall, where a great shadow blocked out the light through the frosted, coloured glass in the front door.
Katy’s tail extended fully, and Layla backed against the stairs, one arm across her wounded stomach, tightening her grip on the knife.
“Keys,” Katy whispered.
Layla pointed at the door where the key was in the lock.
Katy’s dad would say this was a bad idea, in case of a fire, and the key melted in the lock or was too hot to turn. She nearly repeated this to her older cousin verbatim but stopped herself.
Now wasn’t the time.
She opened the door to a hulking middle-aged Foreman, backed up by five identical brothers. He looked surprised to see her.
“Hello, little lady,” he said, in slippery, patronising tones, and Katy saw instant red.
She whipped her tail down and struck the point clean through his chest, yanking him inside before anyone could move.
Layla lunged forward, knife ready, but Katy didn’t need her getting in the way. She pushed her cousin back down the hall and tossed the first one against the wall as his brothers bulled their way into the house, their glories shifting dimensions and warping the door’s shape and size to admit all five of them at the same time, and the wicked tail tip lashed out again.
It slashed two across their throats and got a third through the centre of his forehead, throwing him back against the door and slamming it shut on spurts of blood and carnage.
Brothers five and six were having trouble keeping the hall wide and spacious on their own. It wobbled back into its actual, narrow dimensions, and they tripped over the bodies of the first four and went sprawling.
Katy impaled one through his torso and flipped the other over.
“Do you know who I am?”
She’d always wanted to say that.
He nodded, turning ashen under his salt-and-pepper stubble. His eyes clouded with confusion as he took her in: a seventeen-year-old with an athletic build, messy, unbrushed hair, and all the usual Porter features, almost indistinguishable from her cousins in a crowd.
“I thought you’d be—”
Katy cut him off. “If you say ‘taller’ or ‘older’, I swear to Grandad I’ll rip your head off right fucking now.”
She didn’t need to Change, but she wanted him to see her.
The Beast unfurled its petals of monstrous flesh, and she twisted and grew into the beautiful, unstoppable creature of appetite and death she was born to be.
Her four leaves of gaping teeth parted, sucking down the poor offerings of corpses and the stink of urine and fear from the living.
The auras were not the same as others she’d devoured.
These reminded her of the devotees of death at the funeral – reeking of earnest belief. She had gulped them down and nearly gagged on their piety, and this speck of mortality before her radiated the same desperate glow of righteousness. He wasn’t a monster, any more than Layla was. He was just trying to do the right thing.
The Beast had its own ideas about what that ought to be.
I am your god. Get on your knees.
The surviving Foreman scrabbled onto all fours, cowering before the gigantic single claw that sprouted seamlessly from her hoof.
You will tell the family this: no one is to touch the Wend-McVeys. Not Layla, not her brothers, not her mother, not any of them. No one can touch those whom I have taken under my protection.
The Foreman quivered and burbled incoherently, but the Beast knew he understood.
Get out.
He scrambled to obey, flying out of the house and its warped dimensions into the quiet street.
Katy folded back into herself, bones crunching and flesh flopping wetly into new positions as her human form reformed, until she was standing in the four-petalled maw that folded up into her back, melting into new human skin.
When everything settled down, Katy was back to normal, tail retracted into its stump at the base of her spine, dripping mucus on Layla’s carpet.
Layla was clutching the handle of her large knife like a priestess, the tip pointing at the sky, her eyes wide with a wild sheen.
“Can I borrow a couple of towels?” Katy asked, stepping naked onto the tattered remains of her pyjamas. Globs of new skin and Beast flesh slipped off her and splatted onto the rags.
Layla dropped the knife. It hit the floor with a thud and narrowly missed nicking her feet. She hurried away, pale and shaken.
Katy was left shivering in the hall until she came back with fluffy towels and offered them without a trace of the familiarity and informality of a few minutes ago.
“That was just a show for them,” Katy protested, wishing Layla would raise her head and look at her. “It wasn’t for you. Thanks for the coffee, and the toast. Oh, shit, the toast.”
Layla darted into the kitchen again. “It’s a bit cold now. I’ll put some more on.”
“No, you don’t have to…”
Marshmallow appeared on the stairs and hissed violently at her, raking an angry set of claws in the air through the banisters.
Katy hastily towelled herself off.
“I really need a lot of fats and stuff, have you got any peanut butter? I can eat that with a spoon.”
She followed Layla, as her cousin clattered around in cupboards, finally passing her a jar and a teaspoon.
“Is this okay? God, I’m sorry, I don’t know what to call you.”
“Katy.” Katy took the jar, frowning. “I’m exactly the same. You’ve seen me before.”
“I didn’t fully get that it was… you.” Layla shook her head. “You’re—”
“I’m just me.” Katy didn’t want Layla to think she was a god. She liked it when Layla joked around with her, like they were proper cousins.
Layla swallowed, backing against the dishwasher, watching as Katy devoured the whole jar in record time.
“I eat a lot,” Katy said apologetically, mouth gummed with sticky paste and nut oils. “If I don’t, my organs sort of… dissolve.”
“I’ll make a big breakfast, then.” Layla was shaking.
“Thanks.” Katy noticed Harvey had slipped off somewhere. “I didn’t mean to scare your pets. Or you.”
Layla just shook her head and opened the fridge.
“I’ll shower and get dressed,” Katy murmured, backing out of the kitchen. “Won’t be long. Sorry about the mess.”
The hall was blood-splattered, the carpet ruined by a slime patch where her pyjamas lay, and Katy suspected there was a bit of brain on the door. “Hasn’t one of the Shaws got a cleaning company? We could call them?”
“Hannah does, yeah.” Layla stuck her head out and winced. “Oh, my god, how am I going to—”
“Wes will pay for it,” Katy said hastily.
Layla gave her a look, and for a moment, Katy almost felt like things were back to whatever passed as normal. She reminded herself that she’d only stayed overnight, and she was just getting to know Cousin Layla properly, but it had just started to feel like they were part of the same family.
Most of Katy’s relatives tried to pretend Katy was nothing to do with them, an anomaly, connected by a technicality rather than flesh and glory.
The only ones who’d ever made any effort at all were Ricky and Wes, and Ricky had been kicked out of every family thing she’d ever seen him at, or turned up so wasted he scared her, while Wes… She sighed.
Wes was Wes.
But at least he’d tried.
Katy tried to inexpertly assess the damage to the hallway as Layla ducked back into the kitchen and returned with the family directory, a thick booklet she kept in a kitchen drawer. “She’s not in the cult, is she? Hannah?”
“Hope not.” Katy recognised the cover. It wasn’t this year’s, maybe two years old, and half of those names weren’t alive anymore. As Layla flipped through the pages to the ‘Services’ section, Katy saw thick black marker lines through most of the names and details. The family phone book had become a Book of the Dead.
“She’s still alive, at least,” Layla said dryly and with a trace of bitterness, then raised her eyes to Katy, the cornflower blue gleaming with a spark of fear. “Not that – that wasn’t – no offence.”
Katy shook her head. “You can cross off six more. They tasted like Uncle Jim’s sons.”
“That’s a few less mechanics we can call, then,” Layla muttered, and Katy bristled.
“I should have let them kill you, should I?”
“No.” Layla shook her head. “Sorry, no, that’s not what—”
“I’m having a shower.” Katy stomped upstairs, trying to tell herself she didn’t need to feel bad about adding the Foreman brothers to the death count.
Hannah Shaw turned up with her cleaning supplies, always providing the personal touch for family. Layla and Katy stayed in the living room out of the way, with the door closed and the TV on.
“So what are you going to do now?” Katy asked Layla eventually, hugging a plump cushion as Marshmallow glared at her from Layla’s lap, a wide hump of white fur with menacing green eyes.
Marshmallow stiffened at the sound of Katy’s voice, and her tail twitched.
“Hey, Mish-mash-moosh. Be nice.” Layla petted her until the cat relaxed. “Go back to work when I can, why?”
“No, I mean, about the…” Katy gestured at her navel.
Layla understood. “Oh. That. I don’t know. Not much I can do, is there?”
“Does it bother you?” Katy hugged the cushion a little closer. “Do you think Ricky could help you get it back?”
“I don’t know if I want it back,” Layla said.
“Oh.” Katy didn’t know what to say to that.
“It meant I could have a seat at the family table,” Layla said, stroking Marshmallow, “But my brothers never could. They’re my triplets, you know? Excluding them’s like excluding a part of me. Part of me won’t ever be accepted, won’t ever get a vote, won’t ever be acknowledged by the elders. I used to have to hide presents that all our Aunties and Uncles got me, because they only bought stuff for me. We share a birthday. Mum’s got an attic full of stuff I never even opened.”
Katy winced. “At least you got presents, I guess.”
“It’s a whole lot of awkward I could do without,” Layla said, in tones of firm correction. “I mean. It’s cool. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still angry about it. They chopped a piece of me off, for fuck’s sake.” She shook her head. “I still don’t know how to feel about that, the way it happened. It’s my glory. You know? Even if it wasn’t always… glorious.” Her voice trembled, and Marshmallow made a small sound like a sympathy squeak, stretching clawed limbs out along her thighs, then resettled back into a pompom.
Layla worked her jaw for a moment, then shrugged. “I don’t know. Sometimes I wished I could just pop it on and off, you know? Detach it when I wanted to. And now it’s actually gone, I… I don’t know if it’s still the shock, but I’m not missing it. Maybe I will soon, maybe I’ll get angry again, maybe I’ll spend the rest of my life hating them all, but right now… Maybe today’s just a better day and I’ll be in bits about it tomorrow, who knows.”
It had only been a few months since her own Changes, but Katy couldn’t imagine giving up her glory now, no matter what she felt about it. It was everything that made her who she was, even though she didn’t always like that person. She pondered what being the Beast had made her.
“I’d acknowledge your brothers,” she said. “They’re as much a part of the family as you.”
Layla grunted and shook her head. “They don’t want to be acknowledged anymore. They’ve been on the receiving end of the wrong bits of our family for so long they’re only Wend-McVeys, and it’s like the rest of you don’t exist.”
“Fair.” Katy was quiet for a while. She could hear the cleaning going on over the murmur of the daytime talk show. “Would you want to leave?” she asked after a while. “Now that you’re not – now that you don’t have…” No matter how she tried to phrase it, it sounded insensitive. She studied the cushion. “Is that something you’d think about?”
“I think there’s more than one way to do family,” Layla said, lowering her voice with a glance at the living room door. “I don’t think this is a very good way.”
Katy hugged the cushion tighter. “Is that my fault?”
Layla shook her head, strong fingers buried in a purring Marshmallow, made invisible up to the knuckles in the thick, long fur.
“We were broken before any of us were even born. Cousin Ricky said something to me once, not about that, but he said, ‘The path to the future is paved on the choices of the dead’, and it stuck with me.” She narrowed her eyes, frowning at Marshmallow, lost in thought. “I’ve been thinking about that a lot, lately.”
“So – what, we’re all fucked because of a bunch of dead people making shit decisions? And there’s nothing we can do about it?”
“We’re like this because Grandad made us this way.” Layla shrugged. “I mean, literally. We’re literal monsters. And some of us act like it, and you eat them. That’s what you’re for. It’s what Gran wanted for you.”
“Gran’s dead, it doesn’t matter what she wanted.” Katy turned her head to the window, a confusion of feelings churning in her stomach. “And I already told Grandad to fuck off, so.”
She shrugged, pretending she was confident, that she didn’t care, that she never had nightmares. It was easier to fake normality in the daylight, with the TV on.
Layla cocked an eyebrow at her cat with a wry twist of her lips, not looking at Katy. “So if it doesn’t matter what Gran wanted, why are you doing it?”
Katy played with her damp hair. “I have my own agenda, my own List, not hers, it’s completely different.”
“What’s your plan, then?” Layla asked. “What else are you going to do?”
It was the question Katy dreaded. Lately, she didn’t have a clue.
“Uni, I guess.”
Wes was pretty keen on her to see that through, and it had been her main goal aside from travelling, but backpacking had been her best friend’s plan, not Katy’s. If they weren’t going to do that together, then it didn’t matter anymore.
Now, Katy wasn’t even sure about the subject she wanted to study. A few months ago she’d been so sure.
“How are you going to explain the, um…”
“I’m not. I’m not going to. No one’s going to see me Change or the proper tail. If the stump of it puts people off, they were shit anyway.” Katy shook her head. “I’m meant to be dead, so Wes got me new ID, a new name, new start. Everyone else gets to have jobs and lives and stuff. Why not me?”
“I meant, when you have nobody else to kill,” Layla said. “What are you going to do with yourself then?”
Katy chewed her lip. “I don’t know.”
“You’re pretty good at protection,” Layla said, glancing at the door again. “Do you… think you could do that? Instead of eat us?”
“Protect from what?” Katy raked her teeth over her raw lower lip. “From, like, each other, you mean? I guess I could. I don’t know.”
“Anyone who turns their back on the family is fair game.” Layla was paler, staring at the closed door as if she could still see the bodies piled behind it. “Suppose I wanted to leave. Suppose a few of us wanted to leave. How would that work? You could protect us, so that we could.”
Katy pressed her back against the sofa arm and stretched out her legs along the seats. She hadn’t considered this. “What if any of you did something to jeopardise the family?”
“Then you stop them, obviously.” Layla took a breath and looked Katy in the eye. “And you kill them.”
Katy snorted. “Right, so you can’t ever really leave, more like, you opt out of all the family meetings.”
“I guess it’s easier to leave the family than it is to leave your gods.” Layla shrugged. “Especially when you know they’re real.”
“Yeah, I’m not… I’m not exactly a god, am I?” Katy gestured at herself, fidgeting to get comfortable. “But sure. If you want to. I’ll protect you.”
“You know what’s cool? You could be anything.” Layla tickled Marshmallow under her chin, and the cat made a sound like a motorboat engine. “You could be anything you want.”
This quiet assertion hit Katy with unexpected force. This wasn’t something she’d ever considered. If the Beast could be something other than an avenger, a destroyer, then what might she become, in her current form?
Layla turned the TV back up, as their capable cousin finished off cleaning the corpse-gore and skin-slime off the hall carpet.
“Can I stay a bit longer?” Katy asked, as Harvey approached her in good faith, wagging his tail. He hopped up onto the sofa, big eyes hopeful of some petting of his own, one runner appealing to another.
Katy wasn’t used to animals. She’d never had any, and pets never lasted long around her family. Or her former best friend, for that matter.
She scratched behind his ears with a weird sense of pride that he trusted her and tried to sound nonchalant. “I doubt anyone else will mess with you for a bit, but, you know. Just in case?”
Layla’s mouth twitched. “Sure, babes.”
“Thanks.” It should be Layla thanking her, really, but Katy meant it.
Right now, the blissful normalcy of a detached house in a Basildon cul-de-sac, with its neutral colours and catalogue furniture, rescue pets, and a cousin who didn’t eat eyeballs, was the best thing in her whole fucked-up world.